First Wines of Argentina Awards - the results

Here is the full list of medal winners in the first Wines of Argentina Awards which I judged in Mendoza last week and which spawned my week of blogs.

The trophies were awarded on the third day of the competition by having all 12 judges taste all gold medal-winning wines blind and individually and combining their marks – except where there was only one gold medal as in the Sauvignon Blanc and White Blend categories. Thus, I can work out which wine was which in the smaller categories such as Sparkling Wine and Torrontés (I preferred the richer Colomé example to the trophy-winning more sculpted one from the much larger Lavaque group). The trophy categories were, in descending order, Sparkling Wine, Sauvignon Blanc, Torrontés, White Blends, Tempranillo, Red Blends, Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec and Syrah.

Producers, however big, were only allowed to enter five wines from each of their bodegas. Companies that seem to have done particularly well in terms of golds and trophies are the Austrian-owned Norton, the giant Peñaflor's subsidiaries Trapiche and Santa Ana, the French-owned Domaine Vistalba (Fabre Montmayou in Mendoza and Infinitus in Patagonia) and Callia in San Juan (the estate sold by Carlos Pulenta to Salentein of Mendoza who also own El Portillo). Carlos Pulenta now has his own very smart Mendoza winery to make Tormero and (confusingly) Finca y Bodega Vistalba labels and operates quite separately from his brothers who run Pulenta Estate, which also did pretty well in the Awards.

Note that any name with an SA or sa after it is a limited company. Of the golds and trophy winners, Zuccardi is a particularly well established family company; Lavaque is one of the bigger companies with enterprises in many of Argentina's wine regions; Luigi Bosca is run by the Arizu family; Tittarelli is an old firm but now part of an investment group and I have to say that I was not a great fan of the trophy-winning Tempranillo myself; Don Domenico is a newish Italian/Argentine company; Cave Extrême buys in grapes for champenisation and is run by the man who used to run the Chandon sparkling wine enterprise that has been doing a sterling job in Argentina for decades (sister company to Terrazas de los Andes for still wines which did reasonably well in the Awards); Colomé is run by Swiss art collector Donald Hess who also owns the Hess Collection in Napa Valley, Peter Lehmann in Australia and Glen Carlou in South Africa; Valentin Bianchi is one of the old Argentine bodegas with some outside investors nowadays; Tamari is new and Chilean-owned (the big Argentine outpost of Chile's giant Concha y Toro) which picked up a few silvers and bronzes; Fournier is the Spanish-owned Tempranillo specialist (A-crux is a blend based on this Spanish grape); Doña Paula is owned by San Pedro of Chile; Dominio del Plata is the small outfit run by Susana Balbo, dynamic head of Wines of Argentina and her viticulturist husband Pedro Marchevsky; and Enrique Foster is a small producer concentrating on old-vine Malbec owned by a Spaniard resident in the US. This international mix is entirely representative of Argentina.